The Montgomery County Election Commission will extract and store the November 2014 election results because of a pending legal challenge to the passage of Amendment 1. The State Election Commission has ordered Montgomery County – as well as all of Tennessee’s county election commissions – to extract all of the November 2014 election data, and store it that on external devices, according to a notice from the local Election Commission. The lawsuit, challenging how the state calculated the votes for Amendment 1 – a constitutional amendment giving the the Tennessee General Assembly more leeway in enacting abortion restrictions – has not yet been resolved. Thus the 2014 election data will need to be extracted and preserved to be used in the lawsuit, said Vickie Koelman, the administrator of elections.

“That lawsuit is ongoing, and before we can use our machines for the next election that procedure has to take place,” Koelman said.

Tennessee’s constitution says that for an amendment to pass, voters of the state have to “approve and ratify such amendment or amendments by a majority of all the citizens of the state voting for governor, voting in their favor.”

… Montgomery County voting machine technicians, county election commissioners representing both parties and a technician from the voting machine company – Microvote – will be present for the extraction, Koelman said.